We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: Summary & Key Insights

When I first speak in this story, I am a college student trying to live quietly under the radar. My speech is careful, my memories fractured. I tell you that I used to have a sister named Fern, and that one day she disappeared. At first, I leave out the fact that Fern was a chimpanzee. I omit it because I want you to know me—not as a curiosity in a case study—but as a person still trying to understand what that loss meant. My memory plays tricks, jumbling the timeline, erasing my edges. I’ve learned that when trauma arrives in childhood, it doesn’t leave; it simply hides, resurfacing in unexpected ways. The loneliness follows me like a shadow.

As a child, I was a storyteller, filling silence with words when my family refused to speak. My father was a respected psychologist at Indiana University. My mother, his assistant, once brimmed with scientific zeal, until grief hollowed her out. My brother Lowell and I—well, we both grew up on the fault lines of our parents’ ambitions. I began this tale from the middle because the beginning required a reckoning: the revelation that Fern’s disappearance wasn’t just a mystery, but a moral wound running through everything that came after.

We were a family like any other—at least that’s how it seemed from the outside. My father’s experiment had scientific logic: raise a human child and a chimpanzee together to study language acquisition and emotional development. Fern was my sister in every sense that counted. We shared a crib, toys, food, even tantrums. She learned more sign language than spoken words, but to me, that made no difference. We were twins—our hands spoke to each other long before our mouths could.

The Cooke household was filled with observation. There were cameras, charts, data logs—Fern and I lived under constant scrutiny. My father’s colleagues came and went, taking notes, while my mother tried to create warmth under the fluorescent hum of scientific detachment. But as Fern grew, so did the tension. She was stronger than me, wilder, and our roughhouse play began to scare adults. The same gestures that once drew laughter now provoked alarm.

Looking back, I see that what tore our family apart wasn’t cruelty, but a failure of understanding. My parents believed they could study love as though it were measurable. They forgot that love resists control—it thrives on freedom, not confinement. When the experiment ended, no one could articulate exactly when the research had crossed the line into something irreversible. Fern had become too much like me; I had become too much like her. And in that mirror between species, everyone saw something they were afraid to name.